1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to document management, and more specifically to mechanisms for accessing, manipulating, and disseminating collections of documents.
2. Background of the Invention
Despite the ideal of a paperless environment that the popularization of computers had promised, paper continues to dominate the office landscape. Ironically, the computer itself has been a major contributing source of paper proliferation. The computer simplifies the task of document composition, and thus has enabled even greater numbers of publishers. The computer promotes individual expression through the use of graphics tools, image capture devices, image enhancement tools, and so on, in addition to traditional text editing. Oftentimes, documents must be shared among colleagues, thus generating even more paper.
Despite advances in technology, practical substitutes for paper remain to be developed. Computer displays, PDAs (personal digital assistants), wireless devices, and the like all have their various advantages, but they lack the simplicity, reliability, portability, relative permanence, universality, and familiarity of paper. In many situations, paper remains the simplest and most effective way to store and distribute information.
The conveniences and advantages that paper offers signal that its complete replacement is not likely to occur soon, if ever. Perhaps then, the role of the computer is not to achieve a paperless society. Instead, the role of the computer may be as a tool to move effortlessly between paper and electronic representations and maintain connections between the paper and the electronic media with which it was created.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,754,308, “System and Method for Archiving Digital Versions of Documents and for Generating Quality Printed Documents Therefrom,” Lopresti et al. describe one method for moving between paper and electronic representations. The system uses an enhanced copier to scan a document information designator present on each page that uniquely identifies that page and enables retrieval of a stored digital representation of that page for output. This system requires hard copies of each page to be used for retrieval and does not guarantee security during the storage or retrieval processes.
Related, commonly owned applications for “Method and Apparatus for Composing Multimedia Documents,” and “Multimedia Document Sharing Method and Apparatus,” the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference, describe techniques for organizing multimedia documents into one or more collections. A collection coversheet representative of the collection can be printed on a suitable medium, such as paper. This coversheet can provide access to the collection by using a multi-function peripheral (MFP). In this way, individuals can share multimedia documents in the collection by distributing copies of the coversheet to recipients.
It is desirable to simplify the process of creating and manipulating document collections, so as to encourage users to make more effective use of such electronic storage mechanisms. Existing techniques provide user interfaces allowing users to specify, via input devices such as buttons and touchscreens, what operations are desired. However, what is needed is a system and method that simplifies operation of the system by allowing a user to specify desired operations without having to learn or use a user interface.
In many situations, users may wish to add annotations to stored documents and collections. What is needed is a mechanism for automatically reading such annotations, processing them if appropriate, and adding them to the electronically stored copies of documents and collections. What is further needed is a mechanism for performing such operations in a simple, easy-to-use way.
Often, a user wishes to provide different levels of access to a document or collection to different individuals. What is needed is a mechanism for providing such different levels of access for different users, while maintaining the convenience of using coversheets to provide access to collections.